In “Talk to Me like the Rain and Let Me Listen” Tennessee Williams guides us through an elegy concerning human relationships and loneliness. He splits his own contradictory interior monologue into two unnamed characters, Man and Woman, supposably supposedly a couple which is living together in a cold-water flat. She is a drunk. He is wasting away to nothing. There is intimacy between them – the intimacy of desperation. She woke up that morning in some random hotel in a bathtub full of ice cubes. No idea how she got there. She found her way home. Meanwhile, he has drunk nothing but water for 3 days. He stares out the window. He is wasting away. On purpose.

We started our work on “Talk to me like the rain…and let me listen” as a university project of the postgraduate course “Bühnenbild_Szenischer Raum” at the Technical University of Berlin. Already during the project we both got intimately involved with the play and totally connected to the idea of analysing the piece through video projection at multiple levels. After the final presentation of the project we decided to go one step further and bring the project on stage. As we After receiving a residency at TheaterSpielRaum Bethanien, we built a very creative team and enjoyed the intense six weeks of working together.

Our crew is glad and happy to present to you the final outcome of these six weeks.Please be invited to our after performance party!

When suddenly, at the midnight hour, an invisible troupe is heard passing with exquisite music, with shouts — your fortune that fails you now, your works that have failed, the plans of your life that have all turned out to be illusions, do not mourn in vain. As if long prepared, as if courageous, bid her farewell, the Alexandria that is leaving. Above all do not be fooled, do not tell yourself it was a dream, that your ears deceived you; do not stoop to such vain hopes. As if long prepared, as if courageous, as it becomes you who have been worthy of such a city, approach the window with firm step, and with emotion, but not with the entreaties and complaints of the coward, as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds, the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe, and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing. Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

As we were going further with our analysis and reading the text a little bit more carefully, while knowing a little about Tennessee’s backround as well, we can easily recognise Tennessee Williams himself behind these two contradictory monologues. So it didn’t took us long to see that what Tennessee Williams actually does in the text of Talk to me like the rain is that he splits his own contradictory monologue into two new ones, the man and the woman’s monologues which develops coherently while the play goes on.

Two monologues although they are different from each other, they leave the audience with the same feeling like they are both coming from the same person, like one of them is an illussion, like one of them is no on stage. One can presume that there is no woman and the man is fantisizing all these things or that there is actually no man and the woman is somewhere alone lost into her own thoughts, leaving her sad past behind her. Our interpretation of the story is based on our first feelings of this same essense the two monologues had and developed further based on small details in the text and drove us to end up in the following outcome.

The man is coming back. It is late at night and he is drunk and in a rather sad, melagcholic mood. He takes off some of his clothes throwing them carelesslly, some on the bed, some on the chair next to the window. The chair where she was sitting usually waiting for him. She has left him. The time period we choose is about 6 months after she left him. He is in the bed half drunk, half asleep, trying to rest to get some sleep but he can’t. He is opening the TV. He is watching then falling asleep again, then waking up from the sounds of the TV, then falling asleep again. Somewhere between state of mind for the man starts his monologue. He is talking about how cruel people can be to a man who wonders alone in a city, to a man who wonders alone in life. The way he is talking about lonelyness and the cruelty, the indifference people show is enchacing the feeling that he is alone, that the woman has left him. She is not with him anymore. He is saying in his monologue that he wanted to call her but he couldn’t. To tell her what? That he is lost in the city. Lost without her. All these little things, details onemight say but for us all these together form in a very coherent way a man talking on his own, thinking over a passed relationship a loved one who is not here anymore.

The TV, the window, the child’s voice for us work metaphorically. They are somehow a connection to her, to his subconcious. Like activating a secret path to this parellel world of his most inner thoughts.

A furnished west of Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. On a folding bed lies a Man in crumpled underwear, struggling out of sleep with the signs of a man who went to bed very drunk. A Woman sits in a straight chair at the room’s single window, outlined dimly against a sky heavy with a rain that has not yet began to fall. The Woman is holding a umbler of water from which she takes a small, jerky sips like a bird drinking. The man first starts with his monologue. Two people in a room talking to each other but not together. Like they are on their own, lost in their thoughts, lost in vain schemes of some far antisipated good. At a first glance in Tennessee Williams’ narration we see the detailed description of a young couple which seems to be rather remoted from each other, isolated, each on lost in their own thoughts. They start talking to each other as talking alone, through a series of monologues as if they were talking alone.

It all started a couple of months ago, during a University Workshop. A Set Design & Video Workshop, with Marsha Ginsberg and Heiko Kalmbach. Both of us, Eleni and Ria are studying our masters in the faculty of Stage Design and Scenic Space in TU Berlin. During this workshop we were asked to experiment and combine stage design and video projection to express the absence or the presence of our characters during the play. Our first thoughts had to do with presence and absence. Who would be mentally and who would be pcysically on stage and why. What did that mean for us. so we decided to make a very draft model to start with, connect our camera and project it in a surface so we could start experimenting inside that space. So we started the workshop and the first days we just experimented. In our basement:

SCENE. A furnished west of Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. On a folding bed lies a Man in crumpled underwear, struggling out of sleep with the signs of a man who went to bed very drun k. A Woman sits in a straight chair at the room’s single window, outlined dimly against a sky heavy with a rain that has not yet began to fall. The Woman is holding a umbler of water from which she takes a small, jerky sips like a bird drinking.

Both of them have ravaged young faces of children in a jamished country. In their speech there is a sort of politeness, a sort of tender formality like that of two lonely children who want to be friends, and yet there is an impression that they have lived in this intimate situation for a long time and that the present scene between them is the repetition of one that has been repeated so often that it’s plausible emotional contents, such as reproach and contrition, have been completely worn out and there is nothing left but acceptance of something hopelessly inalierable between them.

MAN. [hoarsely] What time is it? [The Woman murmurs something inaudible.] What honey?

WOMAN. Sunday.

MAN. I know it’s Sunday. You never wind the clock.

[The Woman streches a thin bare arm out of the raveled pink rayon sleeve of her kimono and picks up the tumbler of water and the weight of it seems to pull her forward a little. The Man watches solemnly, tenderly from the bed as she sips the water. A thin music begins, hesitantly, repeating a phrase several times as if someone in a next room were trying to remember a song on a mandolin. Sometimes a phrase is sang in Spanish. The song could have been Estrellita.]

[Rain begins, it comes and goes during the play, there is drumming flight of pigeons pass the window and a child’s voice chants outside-]

with clementins and tea, the left overs from a terrible cold last week and lots of ideas I’ve started writing tonight our first post in the diary blog of ”talk to me like the rain” a play of Tennessee Williams.

this is a space created so we all, me, eleni, ria and the all the other members of our team can share our thoughts concerning this project, research material, upload photos and videos from the rehearsals and other parts of the developement of the project and of course, last but not least banana pancake recipes.

that’s all for tonight, we will come back to you soon with lots lots of material.